- Viertel, Peter
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▪ 2008German-born novelist and screenwriterborn Nov. 16, 1920, Dresden, Ger.died Nov. 4, 2007, Marbella, Spainwas wholly or partly responsible for the scripts of such films as Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942); The African Queen (1951), for which he wrote the dialogue; White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), which he adapted from his own 1953 novel of the same name; and the screen versions of the Ernest Hemingway novels The Sun Also Rises (1957) and The Old Man and the Sea (1958). He was the son of German screenwriter-director Berthold Viertel and writer-actress Salka Viertel, who moved to Hollywood when he was a child. He attended Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., and the University of California, Los Angeles, and published his first novel, The Canyon (1940), at age 19. In addition to his film scripts and novels, Viertel was well known for his close associations with Hemingway, director John Huston, and other celebrities. Viertel died less than a month after his second wife, actress Deborah Kerr (Kerr, Deborah ), whom he married in 1960.
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Universalium. 2010.
